Bari Tessler has published a book to buy: The Art of Money: a Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness.

As an author Tessler has a generous and compassionate voice. As a Financial Therapist Tessler has revolutionized how to approach dealing with money matters.

On her website she talks about calling an emergency fund a Peace of Mind fund instead. In her book she tells readers to rename expense categories in our budgets to reflect our values. For instance Mortgage becomes Home Sweet Home.

Tessler’s vision is brilliant. Her insight and information is right-on. I recommend buying this Tessler book and the Vitug book I reviewed too–You Only Live Once. These two books taken together could be the start of creating a solid foundation with our finances.

Forget all the rest and now try the best: You Only Live Once: The Roadmap to Financial Wellness and a Purposeful Life by Jason Vitug.

I reviewed the Alexa Von Tobel book Financially Fearless in a blog entry here. Her book seemed okay at the time. Now Vitug’s book is the one truly remarkably visionary personal finance book.

Vitug is not a CFP–certified financial planner–yet his common-sense guide puts other CFP books to shame. Move over Suze Orman. Jason Vitug is here.

His book YOLO should be read and heeded first before even considering reading the other CFP books. For one he tells us to create a spending plan linked to our values and our vision for how we want to live our lives.

When we create this spending plan [a budget] we can spend our extra discretionary income on what reflects our values. This amount doesn’t have to be 10 percent or 30 percent. It can be whatever we want it to be provided: we’ve first paid ourselves first [funded our savings and retirement], paid our expenses, and paid any debt we have.

After we knock off these essentials, Vitug tells us we can buy whatever we want as long as it’s linked to our values and our vision for our life.

The first step is to write down what we value and write down our vision for how we want to live our life. This is something no other financial planner focuses on as the root of how to manage our money.

Now I see why traditional personal finance books and accounting systems fail people. I’ve read them all over the years–no wonder it was hard–no impossible–to stick to those “budgets.”

Think of a budget as a spending plan that allows you to have the kind of life you want. But first–as Vitug prophetically tells us–we must know what we value and what our vision is for our lives.

I checked this book out of the library. You can buy the book if you have the money.

Jason Vitug impresses me to no end. Plus the book is shorter and more easily readable than the others.

By all means, consult with a financial planner and use the other books if that is warranted for your situation.

I recommend only two personal finances books from the glut of books that so-called financial experts churn out:

Jean Chatzky’s The Difference details what people who are well-off or wealthy financially have in common. One trait: optimism.

The absolute best book I also recommend is Alexa von Tobel’s Financially Fearless. Forget all the rest–try this book because it’s the best.

Tobel is a CFP who gives the viable formula for personal financial success: allocate your funds this way:

50 percent: on essentials like rent or mortgage plus utilities.

20 percent: on savings and retirement.

30 percent: on your own spending on whatever you’d like.

Total: 100 percent of your budget pie.

Trust me: I’ve read nearly all the personal finance books that so-called experts have published Only Financially Fearless has the only budgeting plan that ever made sense to me: the 50/20/30 allocation of the pie.

Your percentage for each slice of the pie might turn out a little higher or lower and that’s OK. Yet this formula is the most practical and achievable if you ask me.

Start saving early for retirement because the compounding value of the dollars you save will grow like magic over the years. Waiting until later to save for retirement is not the way to go.

Saving whatever you can as consistently as you can as soon in life as you can is the way to go.

You can check both of these books out of the library if you don’t want to buy them.

Living in a high-cost city your essential spending category is most likely going to be higher. That’s OK. Keeping within a modest sliver of these percentages I doubt will make or break a person.